Yahoo!

By Super Admin

New Delhi, Oct 18 (UNI) Leading internet brand Yahoo! India today launched plug-ins for its popular messenger service enabling chatting in local langauges, besides upgraded version of its mail service.

The revamped Yahoo! Messenger 8.0 allow users to chat in Hindi and Tamil using a normal English keyboard, search for content in these languages and access other interactive features like audibles.

''This initiative is an effort to localise our communication products and attract the non-internet users,'' Yahoo! India Managing Director George Zacharias told reporters here.

The company will add 14-16 other Indian languages like Kannada, Bengali, Malyalam, Gujarati, and Marathi to the messenger as well as mail services over the next few quarters.

Majority of the firm's revenues in India are accounted by its communicative (mail and messenger) services, as compared to advertising faciliies globally.

The move comes close after the other two major players in the country's messenger space, Rediff Bol and MSN, launched their services in Hindi and other regional languages respectively.

The company's Web 2.0 mail product, Yahoo! Mail Beta, have been equipped with innovations like easy to use interface, drag and drop mail facility, new reading pane to view messages instantly, tabbed navigation to view/compose multiple e-mails at a time, integrated RSS reader providing access to breaking news, blog entries, and other feeds directly, besides keyboard shortcuts and calendar view integration within mail to give instant alerts for the day's activities.

The internet and advertising market is growing at 50 per cent year-on-year and with its new Messenger and Mail versions the company expect to register more than the market, Mr Zacharias said.

Apart from these products, the company also seeks to introduce new language portals and an in-built chatting system in its Yahoo! Mail in the near future.